


Teach Me To Dance

by Tammany



Series: Town and Country: Sherlock and Janine [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 23:46:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1366180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and Janine. Resolution of relationship from "Cottage Dialogue" and "Love and the Comeback Kid."</p><p>Who can a girl trust? The man who learns to trust her.</p><p>Turned out Gen after all. I really didn't think it would, but my stuff just doesn't reliably go for the graphic ending. I really did think it would....</p>
            </blockquote>





	Teach Me To Dance

 

She’d had music on when he arrived the second time about the bloody fockin’ bees—after she’d chased him off the first time, because really, why _was_ it that the bastard couldn’t get it through his genius head she didn’t want bees? And that no matter how sweet a gormless prat he could be, in the end how were they going to get past that final barrier? Not just that she didn’t want bees—that she didn’t want _him_. Not the gamble of him, not the shame of knowing he’d used her, none of it. Not even after trying…

It was May, that second time. She’d put together one of those build-your-own-station radio stations online, seeded with Van the Man and Adele and Emelie Sande and Billie Joel and all sorts of other big-voice stuff that belted out and took you someplace else instead of where you were. Into another mind if not another place. R&B—lots of R&B.

She had the laptop out in the back garden, and she was digging herself a perennial bed, though she intended to be a sly bitch and stick a bit of rosemary here and some thyme there and a mess of sage down the way, all in and out of the lilies and roses and daisies and asters and peonies and such, so she could always count on what she needed to stuff a nice chicken when it suited her. The wind was off the ocean (Well, when wasn’t it, really?) and the sun was really too hot, and she was wearing old jeans and a limp old T-shirt and her trainers and singing along, making like Spatterpatch and her kits were singing with her. “Janine and the Calico Cats,” which was a bit of a lie because there was one ginger tom and a jet black baby boy kitten, too, but with Spatterpatch and three girl kits all looking like they’d been playing in an artist’s paint box it seemed about right.

She was just finishing up Sande’s “Kill the Boy,” jumping up and down on the blade-back of the garden spade, when he was there, damn him, looming in that black bat-coat at the side of the yard. He said, “Wish-fullfillment fantasy?” And she said, “Cathartic.” And then the song switched and it was Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl.” And he said, “We never did dance at John’s wedding,” and before she could point out that they’d danced quite a bit afterward, he’d swept her up, letting her spade drop to the side, and he was showing her once again just how damned good he was at things he loved. For a few minutes she could have sworn the universe—stars and planets and galaxies and nebulas, the whole damned thing—was spinning in orbit around them, and linnets singing overhead, and he spun her out, and then spun her back into a snug embrace, and then the bastard had to ruin it all by leaning over to kiss her and the red alert siren went off inside her head and the next thing she knew she was five feet away with her back to him, swearing like she was out for an Olympic Gold in profanity.

oOo

The first time he came about the bees was after a call in early April—soft and mild in the south of England, already green and tender and full of lambs on the rolling wold.

“Spring is the best time to set up a hive. Gives them the whole summer to build up their strength and establish themselves.”

“I don’t want bees, Sherlock.”

“I’ve found a good supplier of clean, unused Warré hives, and I’ve located a beekeeper with a strain that’s held up well through the past decade: no die-offs, including daughter hives. Good lines, strong queens…”

“Sherlock, what part of ‘I don’t want bees’ isn’t getting through to you?”

“Honey, Janine,” he said, sounding like he belonged on a food porn show. “Mmmmmm. Delicious honey, from your own hives. Busy little bees flying out across the wold, bringing back pollen and converting it to nature’s best food!”

“Shay-Shay, they’re bugs. Bugs in stripes. With stingers. And I don’t especially like honey.”

“Then sell it—extra income!” She could hear the wicked grin as he added, “We all know how you feel about the profit motive…”

“You’re a naughty boy, Sherl—you just want to play with my bees. I don’t even _have_ bees, and you want to play with my bees.”

“Well—yeah.”

Janine thumped her head down on her kitchen table. She supposed it could be worse. If Sherlock were there with her in the cottage he’d no doubt be climbing on furniture and emoting at full volume. He had to be at least slightly more contained to manage phone communication.

“Get your own bees.”

“If I do can I keep them at your cottage?”

“Keep them at Baker Street.”

“There’s hardly any pollen.”

“You’re right down the way from Regent’s Park, and up the way from Hyde Park. Got to be some flowers there, yeah?”

“Janine…”

“You’re pouting.”

“Mrs. Hudson says I can’t keep bees, under the no-pets clause.” He huffed. “I’m pretty sure she’d let me keep a cat or a dog, though.”

“It may be a numeric thing, Sherl,” Janine said, amused. “One or two cats, a dog or so—versus hundreds of swarming little bugs with poison arses.”

“Yes, but _productive_ little bugs with poison arses. Don’t forget the honey.”

“As if you’d let me…”

“One Warré hive along your back fence line.”

“No. You’ll put it right where I like standing to look at the ocean and the wold and the cliffs.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Yes, Sherlock. I can. It won’t matter what part of my garden I pick, either—wherever I want to be, you’ll put your bees. And then you’ll put more bees. And then you’ll try to get me to help take care of your bees. I don’t _like_ bees, Sherlock. They sting and they get in the house on hot days and you can’t shoo them out again.”

“That’s wasps.”

“Same diff.”

He growled. “Look, let me come down and show you what I have in mind.”

“I don’t think so, Sherl.”

“I’m free this weekend, and just got paid for a case. I’ll rent a car and drive down.”

“I think I’m going to go over to Dublin to see my Mum, Sherl.”

“Ok, leave the key under the mat and I’ll walk the place and work out where the hives can go.”

“You just increased my hive count. Not happening. No bees.”

“Or I could stay the week and get the first Warré delivered while you’re with your mother—that way you don’t have to deal with the fuss.”

Now that was getting dangerous….

“Mum can go a few more weeks without seeing me, and I expect you to drive back home Monday morning, you clot. And no bees. None! I want my cottage to remain a bee-free zone, Sherlock. If you want to keep bees, talk to my neighbors. Talk to Farmer Ensley. No. Bees.”

“I’ll be there Saturday morning. No—Friday night, late.”

She rolled her eyes. “Bring goodies to bribe me and Spatterpatch. Otherwise you can spend your night in the rental car, clever boy.”

“Bribes?”

“Quart of tikka masala from Singh’s place down past your flat. And a quart of their baigan bartha, too. You have no idea how hard it is to get good Indian out here…”

“If I cater to your addiction to Singh’s chicken tikka masala can I have my hive?”

“We’ll talk when you get here, sunshine.”

She hung up, then, before he could start parlaying for the right to fill her entire back garden with hives. She looked down at the fat calico cat at her feet, buried under chubby little kittens.

“Why am I letting him do this?” she asked the cat.

The cat blinked in the sunlight and toppled two kittens from her flank…but had no wisdom to impart.

Sherlock showed up at a little past half-ten in the evening with a cooler full of curries and a heap of beekeeping supply catalogues in a depressingly classy leather duffel-bag along with his clothes and toiletries. He swept out of the car with a swashbuckling flourish, caught up the cooler with one hand, tossed the strap of the duffel over his shoulder, and swept Janine up with his free arm, waltzing her in a circle.

“Shez, you’re here about bees. Believe me, that’s not putting me in the mood for a moondance.”

A brow flicked up, and he pouted. “But I like dancing.”

He did like dancing. Half the time he made her feel like she had two left feet. The other half he made her feel like she should be dancing the lead in Swan Lake…or spinning sexy circles in her own private dirty dance movie. She didn’t like being reminded.

“I’m putting you in my office,” she said. “Couch is all made up for you. Breakfast is toast and jam and make your own tea. I’ll take the cooler and put the curry away.”

She loaded the fridge with Singh’s best, stealing snitches of this and that as she tucked the cartons in the spare space. She could hear him rumbling around her office, humming a snatch of something classical. He went in and out a time or two more, retrieving things from the rental car, then came to lean in the door of the kitchen, watching her do a last wipe down and set out bread and jam and the kettle and the tea for the next morning.

“You’ve put that five pounds back on,” he said, all Holmesian attitude and discombobulating non sequiturs.

“Thank you so much for reminding me,” she grumbled, though the edge was knocked of her annoyance by the knowledge that for some mad reason a man as thin as his high-end mobile phone thought she looked better in size fourteen than in size eight. Or at least was clever enough to say he did.  She frowned. “So. Closed a case lately? What kind? Bloody corpses, clever crooks, or just right bastards?”

“Right bastard. Blackmailer again. I seem to be getting a reputation for them. Pity I can’t promise to resolve the problem the same way I dealt with Magnussen, but Mycroft assures me I’ve bagged my lifetime limit. Apparently if I take even one more they revoke my hunting license.” His face was chill and distant as he rattled it off—all clever words and cold heart.

She raised a brow. “’License’? Only people I know of with that kind of hunting license run in double-oughts. Double-ought-seven, and so on. Having Bond fantasies, Shezza?”

“Better Bond than Bondage,” he quipped, then said, “Mind if I go out in the back garden? Dying for a fag.”

“Smokin’ again?”

He shrugged. “Staving off boredom. Mycroft turns a blind eye to nicotine—thus proving he is neither a doctor nor a biochemist or he would realize the difference is one of legal fictions, rather than chemical certitude.”

She leaned against the counter, and studied him. “Don’ give _me_ that one, Shezza. Seen you riding your high horse…and clingin’ to yer morphine like it was your only friend. Stood by you both ways. You are what you are—and I’ve seen what you are.”

He looked away, avoiding her glance. “So has Mycroft, and it hasn’t improved his understanding,” he said, sharply.

“Mike’s a pompous arse, but he’s no fool,” she said. “But, yeah. Back garden’s all yours, if you want to have a smoke.” She pushed off the counter, leaning down to pick up one of Spatterpatch’s kittens. Feeling wicked, she walked easily across the room and slid the calico scrap over his lapel, letting go when the little claws hooked into the tweed like Velcro. His hands came up reflexively and cradled the beastie safe and secure against his chest. “Here. Have a kitten, too—best mood-altering substance you can access legally.” She skinnied past him, her stomach brushing his side. She pretended the contact hadn’t happened. “I’ll be in the sitting room when you come back in. Want a scotch?”

“Sounds good,” he said.

She didn’t hear him put the kitten down. She smiled.

She lit the gas fire. She poured the scotch. She claimed the armchair, passing up her preferred place on the sofa because it invited too much.

He came in and piled kittens on her lap. “To go with the scotch,” he said, collecting the two glasses and handing her one.

She accepted and took a deep sip. “So. What’s with the bees?”

“Experiment,” he said, grinning, and proceeded to explain in high-speed deduction voice just why her back garden was the perfect site for his bee keeping experiment.

“Bollocks,” she said. “What’s the point of bees in Sussex when you’re in London?”

“Perhaps because I want them to be in Sussex,” he said, looking aloof as a wedge-headed Siamese, almost looking down his nose at her.

“Uh-huh.” She sighed. “Sherl? Ever gonna give up trying to play me like a game?”

He glared. “I’m not—“

“’Scuse, sweetie, but you are. Trying to shine me off with th’ coat and the bees and the bratty routine. Sweep me off my feet when you get here, baffle me with your routines when that doesn’t work.” She closed her eyes and sipped again, curling her senses into the smoky burn of the whiskey. “It’s me, here. Janine. Your very own ‘fool me once, shame on you.’ Not fooling me twice; not by swanning in being Sherlock Holmes all over my place.”

“I _am_ Sherlock Holmes,” he said, fiercely.

“Paid for the privilege,” she acknowledged, calmly. “Paid in full. Doesn’t change the fact that you walk in here, you’re Shay-Shay and Shezza and Sherl, and a couple dozen other people I’ve got no name for, and compared to them Sherlock Holmes is a nothing more than character in a Christmas Panto. It’s a role, and if anyone knows it—anyone at all—it’s me. Why’d you come down to Sussex to talk me into bees? Why’d you spend a fortune on a big rental Land Rover and come sweeping in coat and all and toss your hair and grin your grin?”

He was silent, then, sullen.

She didn’t rise to it. She’d learned. It was a game. So much of it was a game…but that didn’t mean she had to play.

“I brought my violin,” he said, half an hour later, after the scotch glasses were emptied.

She smiled, then, as she got up. “You can play it for me, then,” she said. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow night. I’d like that.” Then she went up to bed alone.

oOo

Van Morrison sang sha-la-la-la-dee-dah, counterpoint to her cursing. Then Harold and the Blue Notes started in on “If You Don’t Know Me, By Now.”

She cursed again. “Damn. You’d think it was all planned out to make me feel a right idjit,” she growled.

“Well if you will play R&B…” he said. “It doesn’t exactly count as coincidence. Mycroft would rule that out on statistical probabilities alone.”

“Damn Mikey anyway,” she snapped.

“I quite agree,” he said, “Seconded and passed.”

They waited till Adele started singing an only slightly less serendipitous “Turning Tables.”

“You left your fiddle behind last time,” Janine said. “I emailed you, but you didn’t answer.” He didn’t answer her words, either. “Looked up how to take care of it online. Didn’t want to hurt it. It’s in the closet in my office. Cool, dry but not parched. Dark. Should be fine. I didn’t take it out of the case.”

“Thank you,” he said. He sounded like his brother—that same tight, almost prim inflection.

“Glad to,” she said. “I know how much it means to you.”

“The most precious thing I own.”

“I know. I’ve heard you play.”

He gave a dry chuff of laughter. “That, too,” he said. Then, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you again.”

“You didn’t,” she said, finally turning to face him. “You hurt me once—and I don’t know when it will be over. But you didn’t hurt me again. Just reminded me.”

“We were doing better,” he said.

“That’s kind of the problem isn’t it? After ‘better’—what next?” She paced past him into the house, saying only, “Pick up my spade and prop it up against the wall, will you?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Mind if I stay out in the garden?”

“Planning for bees?”

“No,” he said. “I think I’ll have to give that idea up. Maybe someday, somewhere else. When I retire.”

She looked out at him from the shade of her kitchen and said, “Sherlock, don’t be daft. You’re never going to retire. You’re going to go on being Sherlock Holmes till you drop dead in a London street—and your last words will be something like, ‘It was obvious,’ or ‘Elementary.’ Sherlock Holmes has no place for a cottage in Sussex and bees and retirement—does he?”

“No?” he asked, his back to her. He fished in his pocket and drew out a pack of cigarettes, taking one out and lighting it. He had to bend low over the lighter, using hands, shoulders, even the tilt of his head to keep the flame out of the gusty breeze. After taking a long drag in he said, “No. I suppose not. It would have to stop being a panto role. No place for panto down here. Bees don’t care, and the brown-eyed girl can’t be fooled in any case.”

“Not anymore. No.”

“No.” He stood there smoking, silent, and very still, listening to the music play. The dance had drained out of him entirely.

The wind was fine—east off the English Channel, fresh from France. The ocean was all white-caps; the sailing boats barreled along over the surface waves. Down the wold she could see the Everett’s sheets gulping wind, filling and emptying, flapping wildly. Sherlock’s black curls fluttered madly against his brow.

“I have stew started on the stove,” she said, then. “Nothing fancy. Some cheap mutton, potatoes, carrots. A loaf of good bread from the baker’s.”

“Sounds good,” he said, half-turning back to her, showing his profile. A face that was almost alien and elven looked at head-on was, amusingly, virtually classic perfection in profile: straight, high-browed, straight nose with a good stop at the bridge, full lips, clear chin that seemed much stronger from the side that it did from the front. The intense angles moving from brow to cheek to jaw were softened in profile. He was almost womanishly beautiful at this angle. Not girlishly…no. The kind of womanly beauty that people for some reason called “handsome,” as though good bones and high foreheads and nice jawlines and well-set eyes were the prerogative of the male sex.

She went in and worked on her stew, adding a bit of this and that, swearing as it failed to quite work. In the end she called her mother in Ireland, who told her to add four big soup spoons of tomato paste and one of brown sauce, and to be sure there were plenty of carrots and potatoes, and it would be right as rain. Oh, and don’t forget a pinch of thyme and a shake of pepper…

Mum was right.

“How’s the young man?” she asked, before Janine hung up. “Any news?”

“I think it’s really over,” Janine said.

“Shame,” her mother replied. “But there’s plenty of fish in the sea, love. You’re a fine girl. If he’s not the one for you, throw him back and drop line again. Something better will be along in no time.”

“I’ll think on it, Ma.” She smiled as she hung up.

She turned down the stew as low as it would go, and went up to her room to write.

oOo

When he’d been there the first time they’d managed to get through the first twenty-four hours pretending it was going to resolve somehow. He’d badgered her for hours about bees, pulling out the catalogues and explaining endlessly about top-rail hives and Warre hives and Lang-something-or-others, and about likely annual production levels (as high as twenty-five pounds a year, but that wasn’t reliable lately due to things like hive-death…)

She’d tried hard to ignore what he was ignoring—that he was hovering like a pup begging attention, and that every move suggested he’d like to inch a little closer, and every gestured threatened to be a touch, a tap, a caress.

They’d danced this dance before, she thought.

She reheated korma for lunch, and they ate in the kitchen together, the tension in the room growing more and more intense, until she was sure each of them knew when the other one had to lick a drop of sauce from a lip, or wipe their mouth with a serviette.

She tried to remember if it had been like this before, the first time, when she’d thought he was her shy, inexperienced suitor—quirky, brilliant, funny as hell, sweeter than honey, a bit of a junky and more than slightly mad. She couldn’t remember for sure through the haze of betrayal. Had they breathed each other’s breath, tracked each other’s eyes, noticed even the slightest shift of feet on the floor below the table?

He talked bees so fast he was like a one-man hive, a slow, heavy drone of sound pouring out steadily. What was the poem she’d been made to memorize as a child? Oh, yes. Innisfree…Yeats.

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

| 

   
  
---|---  
  
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

| 

   
  
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

| 

   
  
      And live alone in the bee-loud glade.  
  
 

Sherlock was the personification of a bee-loud glade that afternoon, humming. She found herself avoiding his eyes, moving always a step or two ahead of him, aware as he followed, mirroring her movements, shadowing her gestures, always there.

In the afternoon he dragged her out to see the spot he thought a hive could go—her favorite corner as she’d predicted. She couldn’t bring herself to say more than that it had the best view. He slipped an arm around her waist. She didn’t push it away. He kissed her, then, head bowing over hers, fingers tracing the veins of her wrist. He pulled back, watching her, gazing intently into her eyes.

“Would you like…” he asked… as he’d asked before.

“Really?” she said. “Really, this time?”

He froze, mouth open, stunned as a deer in the headlights.

“Oh,” she said.  Then… “Oh.”

She watched panic bloom in his eyes. “I…don’t know. I’ve never…”

She shivered, and pulled back. “Let me know when you’re sure.”

He went cold and aloof, as angry as she’d seen him with his brother when they raged at each other. “Is it too much to trust me?”

She stared at him.  “Yes.”

He growled, seemed about to shout at her—then stopped, eyes and body afire with something she couldn’t name—some strange mix of anger and pride and arrogance and shame all tossed together in a dysfunctional heap and set alight by their one stupid attempt to move forward. She sighed, annoyed, and turned away.

“Leave it, Shay-Shay. Just…leave it.”

He took her more literally than she’d intended. Five minutes later he was dragging his sexy leather duffel out of his room. Ten minutes later he was gone.

Three days later she found the fiddle, still sitting on her office desk.

She refused to cry. Instead she emailed him to make sure he knew, and then when down to the kitchen and ate the entire quart of chicken tikka masala in one go.

oOo

She missed him. Missed him worse than she had after his shooting, when she’d been riding on a wave of fury, revenge, horror at his injury, terror at Magnussen’s likely retaliation, and even laughter. The sheer satisfying madness of those interviews with the papers, the talks on the talk shows, the fabrication of tales to rub Sherlock Bloody Holmes’ nose in her payback gave her giggles in the middle of the night, and carried her through mornings that ripped in as nasty as a storm off the North Sea. Their first break-up had almost been a truce…something alive.

This felt like a funeral. Or a war.

He’d taught her to dance. In their second break-up she kept remembering that. The first lesson at John and Mary’s wedding, when he’d been so sweet even as he stated unwaveringly how very bad she was. That lunatic pirouette and that crazy comment that he kept hoping he’d get a case that let him use his love of dance—as though he had no right to it if he couldn’t sneak it in, like a gourmet praying for an expensive lunch meeting at a Michelin five-star restaurant he can legitimately write off as a business expense.

Who needs an excuse to dance, she wondered, then pushed the thought away because they’d broken up and she wasn’t thinking about him anymore.

She thought about those long fingers tracing her pulse; eyes peering into hers evaluating pupil width, as though he were matching his actions to her responses, pushing her buttons…playing her like a game. Or was he looking for signs that she wasn’t gaming him? Proof that he could trust her?

How the hell could she tell?

Idjits, both of them, she thought.

Spatterpatch’s kittens got into her lingerie drawer and laddered her tights. Spatterpatch herself started catching moles and bringing them to Janine, leaving them on the pillow beside her in the morning. It was apparently a sign of spring…

She planned her perennial bed, figuring out where she’d tuck the herbs, plant the perennial walking onions, slip the sorrel and the chard. Her Ma wanted her to plant asparagus, but she wasn’t really ready for that. She wasn’t sure she’d be here so long.

Beans, she thought. A row or two of beans. They smelled so lovely…

He’d taken her out dancing in London, when they were going together. He was good—a good dancer, and not just formal ballroom like you might expect of a posh boy like him—something to dance during the season, when the debs all came out. He took them out clubbing and he owned the damned floor, no matter what came on.

She remembered teasing him. “Oooh, look at you! I thought you’d run dry with the polka.”

He’d flicked her a mischievous glance, and murmured “I can do that, too. I’ll teach you. You’d look good after a polka.”

“After?”

“Hot and flushed.” His eyes had seemed to burn at the idea. “Alive.”

He’d said it so she was pretty sure what he’d really meant was “aroused.”

He’d taught her to dance. And he could dance to anything. Anything at all, the bastard.

She wrote him a second email. The violin seemed to pout on her desk, as sulky as Sherlock at its worst.

The third time she wrote, “Please, come take it home. It misses you.” Then she looked up how to take care of it, and stored it carefully in her closet, because she couldn’t stand staring at that worn, tended leather case.

oOo

She’d been working on her writing notes for almost two hours before she heard him stirring around in her office downstairs. It amused her—she had an office to work in, but most of her writing she ended up doing up in her bedroom on her belly on the bed. Whether typing on the laptop that was currently still with Sherlock, or making notes in her notebooks, she nested to work.

She was two thirds of the way through a nice, saucy novel she thought had a fair chance of selling….She’d discovered she had a talent for over-the-top sex and melodramatic heroes…

The closet door opened and shut, and she sighed. He had his fiddle, then.

She wondered if this would be the last she’d see of him. The last time they’d ladle the sauce at each other, and tease, and laugh. Even angry, he’d felt so right—so much like all the other necessary, obvious things in life. He’d laughed with her. Even furious, that was the one thing she’d never doubted—he’d laughed with her.

She remembered that face in the security monitor of Magnussen’s office. The puppy-dog eyes. The box with the ring.

He’d laughed at her, too…

She could hear him occupying her cottage, owning her downstairs, stirring through the place restlessly, carrying on some mysterious dialogue with Spatterpatch and the kittens. The kitchen door into the back garden opened and closed again.

She went to the window and looked out. He was sitting on the ground, knees tucked up by his chest, arms around his knees, staring out over the dropping slopes of the hills down to the sea. You could see for miles: rolling green turf, white sheep, little oak groves, willows by the streams, and the ocean beyond and the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters, so much more interesting than their big brother at Dover. A kestrel rode the wind above the slope, then dropped like a lead bob, catching something small in the grass.

Sherlock was curled like a little boy, that damned coat wrapped around him, his hands half up his sleeves. His fiddle case sat beside him. Even from here she could hear he still had the laptop playing R&B and Blues-rock and big-voice singers.

She sighed and went downstairs. She finished the stew and poured it into a tureen, then piled everything she needed onto a big hand-painted tray that had come with the place, like Spatterpatch. She stuffed two bottles of cider in her cardigan pockets. She hauled it to the door and groped and hipped her way outside, toting the meal.

“Stew?”

He looked up, then smiled—a very small smile. “Sure.”

She ladled full bowls, and pushed everything else where he could reach it if he needed. She fished in her pockets and offered the cider.

They ate, silent but for the occasional pass-this and mm-good. When it was done she started to tidy, preparing to clear it away, but he looked at her and said, “No. Leave it.” Then he reached for the fiddle case.

He took the instrument out and touched it. She couldn’t help remembering how he’d touched her—and oh, she tried not to remember. There was too much alike between the motions—the delicacy of touch, the intensity of focus, the quivering energy he radiated when his senses were engaged. When he had the fiddle in tune, he pulled the laptop over one-handed, fiddle and bow in the other, and tapped and clicked until he’d silenced her R&B and pulled up file after file, lining them up like ducks in a shooting gallery.

“Concert time?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I used to busk, sometimes,” he said. “As much to annoy Mycroft as anything, but it did make it easier to go between stretches of him dumping me in rehab. It confused issues if I was making my own money and he couldn’t easily track how much it was or what I spent it on.” He clicked, and the music cut in, and the next thing he was ripping madly through a rock-violin accompaniment to the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil.” He was fast and hot and he twisted his music in and out of theirs with style and panache. Then Sting’s “Moon Over Bourbon Street.” Then “Rocket Man.” Then something torchy and old and Roaring Twenties she didn’t recognize. Then he just played: rock, blues, swing.

He stopped, then, fiddle still braced under his chin. “Most of that I heard for the first time stoned off my arse and flying. Concerts. Hit houses. Listening to the boom-boxes while I waited to make a sale. In the clubs.” He glanced at her. “Most the people I know start flinching right about now.” He made a face. “It’s like Magnussen flicking at their bare eyes. It’s easy. Mycroft’s ready to slit his wrists about four new vocabulary words in.” He played an eerie, haunting rill, then let the bow cock back again. “You’re almost the only person I know who’s not on but who is…comfortable. Not happy about it. But not exhausting, all messed up and wanting me to fix it.”

She shrugged. “Learned you can’t make people choose like you wish they would. Learned that knowing is better than not knowing.”

He nodded. “Sherlock Holmes. He deletes this stuff. Doesn’t need it for the work, definitely doesn’t need it for the job.”

“Then who’s playing?” It seemed like a logical question.

“Sherlock Holmes,” he said, and gave her the most fucked up, complicated smile she’d ever seen—a smile so busted up it was like it was patched together the way his chest was. “I’m a self-made man. Did you know that? It suggests that the project should have come with a warning: ‘do not attempt this in your own home without expert supervision.’” He played the Beatles’ classics, then: Yesterday. Ob-la-di Ob-la-da.

“Cultural ignorance. That’s me. Don’t know the sun is the center of the solar system without John telling me. I can’t forget the music, though. It’s like it’s in the bow and in my feet.”

He moved on to the Stone’s “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction),” ripping into it with a ferocity that made her fear for the strings.

“Even John and Mycroft don’t want the part of me that busked in Paddington Station. That knows more words for crack than I know types of ash.” He gave an angry, frustrated laugh. “That’s on my bucket list. Be able to recognize more types of ash than I know words for crack.”

“Is it that part of you they don’t want? Or the bit that’s hooked.”

“Isn’t it the same thing?”

“I don’t know. Not my addiction. You tell me.”

“I liked you.”

She frowned, resigning herself. If this was his way of saying goodbye, it was long and complicated—but the music was good and he wasn’t calling her names or trying to chivvy her into trusting him by being patently untrustworthy. “I liked you, too.”

He smiled then, bright and easy. “Yeah. You did, didn’t you?”

It wasn’t as creepy as it could have been—but it really helped to know Sherlock first. Anyone else she’d have decked.

“Last one before I quit,” he said. “See if you know it.”

She did. “Tupelo Honey,” she risked saying as he sawed into it.

When he was done, he said, “For you.”

“Cock,” she grumbled. “Total arse. Now I have to put in a Goddamned bleeding hive, don’t I?”

“Yep.”

He put the fiddle away carefully, then twisted and bumped and ended up sitting crosslegged in front of her. “There are all sorts of dumb reasons I didn’t trust you. Some smart ones, too. But the biggest one is it felt safe. I’ve never…I made you take all the risks, because I never had.”

“You think I’m going to let you go back to that, you’d better think again,” she said, firmly. “Rotten, dirty, mean trick.”

He nodded, then put out his hands, and said, “If I asked—would you teach me how to dance?”

She looked at him and laughed, putting her hands in his. “Oh, what the hell, Shez. At least this way we’re even. But you still owe me a polka, you git. And the hives go in the other corner of the garden.”

“Of course they do,” he sniffed. “This side has the better view.”

As if she hadn’t told him so.

Ah, well, she thought. He was Sherlock, and apparently Sherlock needed a place to come hide when he couldn’t be a panto character one more minute, or perform for people who were afraid of the truths he knew.

Hundreds of words for crack.

A hive of bees and a song about a woman like honey…

She stood up and dusted off her jeans. “Come on, you. Traditional approach is for you to learn your first position…”

“Boring,” he said. “Let’s start with third.”

“Arse.”

“Always.”

And he was…


End file.
